Dog Blood (20 page)

Something on the far side of the square has caught my eye. Covering virtually the full width of two adjacent buildings from ground level to a height of about six feet are what looks like hundreds of posters. As I get closer, I see that it’s a huge collage of photographs of people that have been pinned, nailed, and stapled to massive sheets of plywood used to board up the buildings. I move nearer, figuring it’s safe to do so because there are other Unchanged milling around here, too. It looks like nothing out of the ordinary. I’ve seen similar displays in films and on TV before, shattered populations coming together to share their grief and build an improvised shrine to remember the friends and family they’ve lost. Maybe Lizzie’s picture is here somewhere? I start to look along the rain-blurred and sun-bleached pictures.

I stop and stare at a random face, one of hundreds, no more or less remarkable than any of those above, below, or around it. It’s a man in his late forties with a mop of curly dark hair, a short beard, and dark, angular-framed glasses. There’s writing in the space below his face. It says, “James Jenkins. Killed his wife Louise and daughter Claire.” There’s a similar scrawled message on the next picture: “Marie Yates. Murdered everyone that mattered to me.” These aren’t the faces of victims, I realize, these are their killers. Christ, is my face up here somewhere? I panic and start quickly scanning the display, suddenly self-conscious, hoping I’ll find my picture before anyone else does. Wish I hadn’t shaved my head like Sahota said. I should have stayed hidden beneath that layer of stubble and shaggy hair. Then, bizarrely, I find myself making a sudden U-turn, hoping that I actually do manage to find my photograph because that, I tell myself, would be proof positive that Lizzie’s been here.

It won’t make any difference.

I force myself to move on, knowing that I can’t afford to waste time. Somewhere in this stinking, unhygienic, overcrowded wreck of a city, the woman I used to share my life with might still be hiding. And if I can track her down, she’ll be able to tell me what happened to my daughter.

I MUST BE GETTING close now. I thought I knew the address Sahota gave me, but around here it looks so very different from how I remember. I’m back out on the farthest edge of the refugee camp, heading for the border with the exclusion zone. The number of Unchanged around me has quickly diminished as I’ve moved out from the center of the city again. It’s a relief not to be surrounded by them and not to have to constantly struggle to keep myself under control. The buildings here are more empty than occupied. There are one or two Unchanged almost always in sight, but they make every effort to ignore me and slide back into the shadows when I approach.

I stop outside a fortified house, metal grilles and bars covering its windows and doors. The houses on either side have been destroyed, but this one looks like it’s managed to escape much of the fighting undamaged. Curious, I walk down a dark, narrow passageway between the house and the rubble of its nearest neighbor. The badly decomposed body of an Unchanged man lies facedown in the middle of an overgrown lawn, military fatigues flapping in the wind around his skeletal limbs. He’s been dead for several weeks at least. Was he the owner of this place? The back door’s been pried off its hinges, and I go inside. Most of the furniture has been used to blockade each room, leaving just a chair, a small table, and a bed in an upstairs bedroom. The remains of boxes and boxes of supplies cover the floors, and the walls have been daubed with pointless, empty slogans. death to the haters is one, kill them before they kill you another. There’s nothing of value left here. I leave the house, shaking my head and laughing to myself at the pathetic Unchanged who clearly spent so long trying to defend and protect what was his. Total waste of effort. He’d have been better off taking his chances in the center of town with the rest of them.

The wreck of a truck blocks the road ahead. It’s over on its side like a beached whale, the contents of the overturned Dumpster it was carrying now scattered across the entire width of the road. I clamber through the clutter and continue down a sloping ramp toward what was once a busy local shopping area. My footsteps echo around the small, drab, square plaza. Half of the open space is submerged under a shallow pool of black, germ-filled water. At its deepest point a dead soldier’s booted foot sticks up above the rippling surface like a shark’s fin.

Around me are a succession of abandoned and looted stores-a bookmaker’s with signs in the window advertising odds on an international soccer match that never took place, a fish-and-chip shop, a takeout pizza joint, a hairdresser’s, a general store… I don’t waste time looking in any of them. If there was ever anything useful in there, it would have been taken or destroyed by now.

I cross the plaza diagonally, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exposed as I walk around the edge of the lapping lake of dirty rainwater, a Hater deep in Unchanged territory. Are they watching me? Eager to get under cover, I quicken my pace and head out between another two deserted buildings. Then I finally see the place Sahota sent me to find. The Risemore Conservative Members Club is as ugly as everything else around here, a squat, square, redbrick social club that looks like it might actually have benefited from having a bomb dropped on it. I used to do all I could to avoid places like this in the days before the war. When I was little, before he walked out on us, my dad used to drag me out to his drinking club some weekends. I’d sit there with him, bored out of my mind, having to make one can of Coke last for hours while he got drunk, smoked, read the paper, argued with his equally drunk cronies or sat and watched piss-poor comics, singers, and variety acts that, by rights should have been banned from performing in public. As I edge closer to the club I automatically build up a mental image of what it’s going to be like inside: loud, stale, musty, a heavy fug of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, grubby, sticky carpets, uncomfortable plastic-covered seating with the stuffing hanging out…

I can’t get in through the front entrance; an impassable mound of fallen masonry blocks the door. I go around to the back to look for another way in, cursing my naïveté. I was never supposed to get in through the front. You don’t want just anyone to be able to stroll up and knock on your front door if you’re trying to coordinate a terrorist cell, do you? Is that what I am now, a terrorist? A suicide bomber without the bomb? Or am I the bomb?

A narrow, brick-walled passageway runs from the front of the building straight through to the back, opening out into an enclosed but largely empty parking lot. Can’t see anyone around here, or even any evidence that anyone’s been here for a while. There’s a fire exit, a strong, metal-clad doorway. I hammer on it with my fist and wait for an answer, starting to doubt whether I’m at the right place. A mangy tabby cat darts out from under a hedge behind me, racing across the parking lot and scurrying for cover under an overflowing Dumpster. Instinctively I whistle for him. I used to like cats.

The fire door opens, catching me off guard. I spin around and find myself face-to-face with a tall, powerful, nasty-looking bastard covered in tattoos. Thank God we’re on the same side.

“I’m looking for Chapman,” I tell him, remembering the name Sahota told me to ask for.

“Who is?”

“I am,” I answer without thinking.

“And who are you, you fucking idiot?” he sighs, taking a step forward and forcing me away from the building, into the middle of the parking lot. He rests his hand on the hilt of a monstrous knife with a vicious serrated blade.

“My name’s Danny McCoyne,” I answer quickly, trying to sound confident and disguise my nerves. “Sahota sent me here.”

At the mention of Sahota’s name the thug visibly relaxes. He looks me up and down again, then stands to one side and ushers me into the building. I do as he says and wait for him to follow as he pulls the door shut again and secures it with a heavy wooden crossbeam. He leads me through the ground floor of the building. My eyes are slow to adjust to the darkness indoors, and I trip down off a slightly elevated wooden stage area. He looks back at me and shakes his head.

Inside, the club is as dilapidated as everywhere else, nothing like the stupid, outdated image I’d had in my head. The floor is littered with the broken remains of off-white polystyrene ceiling tiles. Makes me wonder-if the ceiling’s this bad, how strong is the rest of the building? Disappointingly (but not unexpectedly), the bar has been completely stripped. There’s a row of spaces on the mirrored wall where the liquor dispensers would have been. Christ, I could do with a drink just to calm my nerves. I feel more anxious in here than I did back in the center of town when I was up to my neck in Unchanged.

My chaperone doesn’t want to talk. He leads me along a wide corridor, through another, much smaller second bar, then up a long staircase. There are four doors leading off a square landing. Three of them are open, and I can see at least one or two people in every room. He opens the remaining door, and I follow him into a large function room, which is almost as big as the main bar area we walked through on the floor below. It’s sparsely furnished but largely undamaged. There are several wooden crates of supplies stacked up against one wall. A guy is sitting by himself at a table in the far corner using a laptop, and there’s another asleep on a mattress under a window. As soon as I enter the room a woman gets up from where she’s been lying on a threadbare sofa. She’s hidden by shadows, but something about her is familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen her before. Is she Chapman?

“Who’s this?” she asks. Her voice has a trace of a gentle Irish accent, which is beaten into submission by the abrasiveness of her tone.

“Says he’s looking for you. Says Sahota sent him.”

My unwilling guide disappears, his job done. The woman walks toward me, stepping into the light. I immediately recognize her, but I can’t remember where from. Was it this life? My old life?

“The slaughterhouse,” she says.

“What?”

“The slaughterhouse, few days back. You’re trying to remember where you saw me before. You were there with the guy with the smashed-up hand and foot, and I-”

“You were the one telling me not to bother with him ’cause he’d be dead soon,” I interrupt, suddenly remembering where we met.

“That’s right. And he was. I’m Julia Chapman.”

“You’re a happy soul, aren’t you?” I say sarcastically as I shake her hand, recalling how blunt and matter-of-fact she was when we spoke before. She nearly crushes me with her viselike grip. She’s just trying to let me know who’s in charge.

“I’m a realist,” she answers, “and I’m focused. And so should you be. I tell you, when this war’s finished, I’ll be the first one up dancing at the fucking party and the last one to sit down. Until then, though, all I’m interested in is fighting.”

“Bit of a coincidence, though, finding you here.”

“You reckon?”

“I thought you were busy recruiting for Ankin’s army.”

“I still am.”

“So why are you here?”

“To make sure Sahota gets the right people, too.”

“What? Are you trying to tell me you followed me into the city?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything, but yep, something like that. There were a few more people involved, and it wasn’t just you we were watching.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you like, pal, it really doesn’t bother me. Thing is, we are where we are, and where we are is here. It’s what we do next that matters most.”

“If you say so.”

I wonder if she always talks this much bullshit or if she’s trying to impress me and exert her authority. She looks me straight in the eye, and for a second I think she might be about to throw a punch. She bites her lip and turns away.

“Come here. I want to show you something.”

I follow her out of the room and across the landing. We walk through another part of the building, where two more fighters are resting in the shadows. They glance up at me as I pass them, but they don’t move. We go out onto a narrow veranda, then use an unsteady stepladder to climb up onto a debris-strewn flat rooftop. There are large puddles of water covering much of the ground. A pair of deckchairs have been left under an improvised stretched-out tarpaulin shelter. The views across what remains of the city from one direction and the exclusion zone on the other three are vast and panoramic. Looks like they’ve been using this place as an observation post.

Julia leads me to the edge of the roof on the side of the building that looks out over the refugee camp in the center of the city. The view is incredible, not just because of its scope, but also because of the sense of scale and perspective it gives everything. In every other direction all I can see is abandoned buildings and immense swathes of empty land. Our land. No trace of the Unchanged.

“Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”

Julia’s soaking up the view, staring with palpable hate deep into the city where hundreds of thousands of refugees are cowering in squalor. Their closeness still makes me feel uneasy.

“Is this what you wanted to show me?”

“It is, but don’t just look at it, think about it. Feel it, even. All across the whole country, our enemies are hiding together in places like this. Thousands of them crammed together in the space of just a few square miles at a time, stacked on top of each other, hardly able to breathe. Now turn around and look at what we’ve got. Out beyond the city boundary you can walk for miles and hardly see anyone.”

“I went back to where I used to live,” I tell her. “Couldn’t believe what little space we had…”

“And you know what makes it worse?” she continues, not listening. “Those idiots still have faith in the people who are supposed to be leading them, not that they ever see them or hear anything from them. Christ, they don’t even know who they are. They’re just clinging desperately to the structures and organizations that used to keep their pathetic little lives ticking along, trusting in a system that was dying long before we ever appeared.”

“Can you believe we used to-” I start to say before she interrupts. Her over-the-top enthusiasm for all of this is frightening.

“You know, some of those fuckers still think they’re going to be protected and that everything’s going to work out all right for them in the end. Thing is, you and me and everyone else knows different, don’t we?”

“They’ll never win,” I answer quickly, standing my ground as an unexpected gust of wind threatens to blow me forward. “They can’t.”

“And that’s why what we’re going to do is going to have such an effect. We’re gonna pull the carpet out from under their feet.”

“How many of us are here?”

“Including you, ten.”

“Is that enough?”

“We’re not the only group. There are others. I know Sahota wants to get more than a hundred of us in place when the time’s right.”

“And you think this is going to work?”

“No question. The Unchanged can’t trust each other. Christ, they can barely bring themselves to look at the person next to them anymore. I mean, there’s never been any real trust between strangers, but now they’ve got it into their heads that anyone could turn on them at any second. So there’s real fear in the air in there, a tension and uncertainty that’s never going to disappear. The more of them that cram themselves inside the city walls and the longer they’re in there, the more that fear increases.”

“So we just walk in there…”

“…and light the fuse. They’re right on the edge. I give ’em a week at most, ten days if they’re lucky, and that’s without us getting involved. No food, no sanitation, no medicine, the floods-”

“Makes you wonder how they’ve lasted this long.”

“Have you been in there yet?”

“Coming here just now.”

“So you know what it’s like?”

“I saw enough…”

“Thing is, they’re all out for themselves, whether they’d admit it or not. Every one of them will do all that they can to survive, screw everyone else. Self-preservation means everything to them. It’s all they’ve got left.”

“So when do we do it? When do we go in?”

“It’s up to Sahota. He’ll know when the time’s right.”